


Kings Tomorrow

by kingdra (aroceu)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Reality, Angst, Character Study, Community: hp_darkfest, Depression, Gen, Masturbation, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:02:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aroceu/pseuds/kingdra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no such thing as magic, when you're the scum of the earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kings Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a post on Tumblr. Much thanks to Ana for the last minute beta ♥ All remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> Spoiler warnings in bottom note.

A loud rapping is at Harry’s door.

“Get up! It’s time to get up, boy!”

Harry groans and opens his eyes. He would roll over, except there’s barely any room to in this small cupboard. He turns on his light and sees a spider on his blanket, and then instinctively flicks it off before regretting it immediately. He’s liked spiders in this cupboard. They’d made him feel like he had friends.

“WAKE UP!”

“I’m up, I’m up,” Harry mumbles, pushing back any other words that threaten to come out. Like,  _calm down Aunt Petunia_ , or  _aren’t you going to get Dudley to wake me up instead?_  He wouldn’t want that, no, because Dudley likes to kick him where it hurts and shove his head down toilets. But anyway, he can’t say any of that or else he’ll be subjected to triple the amount of chores for the next month.

All his clothes—all four pairs of them—are in a pile at the other side of the cupboard. He picks through them, and then sees the grey elephant skin-like outfit that Aunt Petunia had “made” for him over the summer. He sighs and flops down and thinks of his dream.

He’s been having this dream all summer—sometimes, he even thinks it’s real. Where he’s taken away and has  _magic_ , and has to defeat an evil bald man and gets a girlfriend. And he has friends—two best friends, a ginger boy and a messy, brown-haired girl. He smiles at the thought, wonders if these people actually exist.

(He’d done some looking up in early August, about dreams, at Mrs. Figgs’ house, and the website had said that usually the people you dream about are people you might’ve seen on the street. None of them are actually made up. Harry hopes so.)

“Boy!” This time it’s Uncle Vernon. “Are you sure you’re awake in there!”

Harry’s heart is sinking by the second, because every moment he’s not in his dream he’s in his own living hell, and that living hell is called life.

“I am,” he mumbles, wishing he weren’t.

*

The first day of school is almost as bad as home with the Dursleys. Almost.

Kids won’t stop staring at him, at his ridiculous clothes—and there are two types of kids who do this, the silent ones and the aggressive ones. The silent ones turn around to their friends and giggle when he walks by, whispering, sending him sidelong glances and making him wish he was wearing something,  _anything_  else.

The aggressive ones go after him with grins on their faces and hands outstretched, and during lunch he’d gotten his tray (full of goop anyways, so he tries to tell himself he doesn’t mind too much) knocked down and his face nearly smashed in. He has a few bruises from running to the back of the school and having scrambled on the dumpster which was too small for the bullies to climb up and reach him. He skips a class and gets a note for it afterward.

His dormitory is small and dark just like his cupboard and he likes it and wants to hate it at the same time because it reminds him of home. His roommate never looks at him and Harry knows his name only by the sign on the door. At nights wishes he were somewhere else even though he doesn’t know where that somewhere else is.

*

_In his dreams, sometimes, there’s a red-haired girl. She smiles at him and his stomach gets all flippy and she’d liked him first but he’d fallen for her harder._

_Ginny, he knows. Her name is Ginny and he wanders over to her and takes her hand and she smiles._

_“Hi, Harry,” she says and his tongue is in knots._

_“Would you like a kiss?” she asks. Harry nods, and she leans over, smelling like flowers and singed potions and a little bit of chocolate. Her fingers are still entwined with Harry’s as their mouths meet—_

_  
_ *

Harry’s eyes pop open, and he wishes they hadn’t. He’s hard, under the bedsheets, he knows. He sighs and rolls out, glances at his roommate’s bed. It’s empty.

He trudges out of his room and to the restroom several paces away, because even though it’s school, it’s still where he lives and he needs to wank off. He’d done it quite a bit, back at the Dursleys, in his own room with the box of tissues he’d sneaked. But he doesn’t have any tissues in his bedroom so it’s to the toilet he must go.

He’s grateful that it’s empty and wanks in the third stall, and when he’s done he leans his forehead against the cool metal wall and urges himself better. To stay awake, or—no. To not stay awake. To dream again. Because who would want to be awake in this life of his?

When he walks back to his room, a group of boys sees him and they’re—they’re the aggressive kind, because they push him back and throw his glasses on the ground and break his nose and Harry wants to cry even though he knows he can’t.

*

_Sometimes he dreams about events instead of people._

_The people are there, yes, cloudy figures floating in the background. Harry can’t remember all of them quite well. He remembers train rides, delicious food and candy and maybe that ginger boy and brown-haired girl again. He remembers laughing, seeing new people, panicking—maybe a little._

_There’s another one where a hat is on his head and he’s gripping the edges of the stool he’s sitting on so tight that his knuckles may have turned white. He’s whispering something, although he doesn’t quite know what it is—it’s something of utter importance, however, and the hat whispers back and then shouts, makes his heart jump into his throat, and—_

_Harry’s never experienced that before, elation, happiness, but he feels it now in his dream, and figures clad in black explode all over the golden hall as he beams and Harry wants to live in this moment, wants to—to find a feeling like this in the real world. Forever._

_  
*_

It’s his dream.

His alarm goes off at six in the morning as always. It’s the fourth week here, nearly a month, and Harry has bruises on his elbows and a few cuts and scratches on his back. Maybe his nose is still broken and he doesn’t want to go to the nurse, even though he knows sooner or later he should.

He thinks about his parents, this morning. Something in his dream had told him that everything his aunt and uncle had told him about his parents was a lie, and Harry wishes that it were true. That his parents—that his parents were larger than life, were  _extraordinary_. Weren’t killed in a car crash.

But the ragged scar on Harry’s forehead is proof enough that his parents had died of something so human, so simple, so— _accidental_ , and Harry burns with hate. With hate for them, for being so stupid. For leaving him here. For torturing him.

He stares down at his hands but his eyes feel dry, and he sighs and tries to push everything out of his mind for school today.

*

“Think you’re something special, don’t you?”

They’re year tens, kicking him into the ground. They’re on the school rooftop, and Harry has nowhere to run.

“Well guess what, you’re not,” says the leader boy, and the other boys laugh. This isn’t as bad as when a few girls from primary school had broken his glasses and then his ankle, but his glasses are broken now. They’re always broken.

“Maybe the second years couldn’t reach you, but,” the leader boy sneers, “ _we_  could, because we’re older, and you’re nothing special, just a wimp.”

Harry’s lip trembles and he’s fighting to say something, anything to get him out of this spot—he’s curled up into his stomach and trying to protect himself, even though blood is spurting uncontrollably from his nose and his face is covered with scratches.

“They came to us like wimps, too, but,” the leader scoffs, “I can see why they wanted to get you. You’re a little freak, aren’t you? With your glasses, just hoppin’ around like a kangaroo.”

“Like a fuckin' kangaroo,” laugh the other boys, and Harry’s eyes burn.

“Well, guess what.” The leader boy leans down so his face is centimeters from Harry’s and Harry can smell the smoke on his breath. _“_ You ain’t hoppin’ around anymore."

*

“Oh dear, you should’ve told me earlier,” the nurse says, patting around Harry’s nose. “Now it’s all infected and I have to give you antibiotics.”

She’s nice and sort of plump and reminds Harry of a woman in his dream, although he can’t quite place which one. There are quite a number of women in his dream (he likes them, sometimes), like the one who can turn into a cat, and the other one who looks like a toad, and the one with the colorful hair, and the mother of that ginger boy. And a few others, but he can’t remember them all when he’s awake.

He sits on the mat obediently as she runs her fingers along his nose, feeling where it had broken. “I’ll have to put a bandage on this,” she says with a sigh, and then goes into a drawer and pulls out those white bandages Harry’s seen on the losers’ noses in films he used to sneak to watch back at the Dursley’s.

“Ah - no, can’t you just fix it in - another way or something?” he says, shying away from her hands.

The nurse looks partly irritated, partly sympathetic. “No, dear,” she says, starting to put the bandage on him. “You’ll have to wear this for the next few weeks.”

“Can I - miss lessons then?”

“Dear.” The nurse is frowning. “It’s only a broken nose, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

 _Fine, right._  Harry wonders if he can keep his nose from getting broken again for how stupid he looks for another few weeks.

He thinks about the boys who’d hit him on the rooftop that time. Thinks about that leader boy, with smoke on his breath. A thought strikes him.

“Hey, Miss, um,” he says, but her back is turned and she doesn’t respond so he doesn’t think she heard his faux pas. “Um,” he tries again, “are we—is it allowed to smoke, on school grounds?”

The nurse turns to him. She’s still frowning.

“Harry dear,” she says, because she knows  _his_  name. “This is a disciplinary school. We’re supposed to get you  _out_  of that habit.”

“Oh, no, not me,” says Harry quickly. “I just - what if I told you that I knew another student was smoking?”

*

He thinks he might’ve had a good day for  _once_ , and falls into his bed with a vague smile on his face.

*

_This time, he dreams of a pointy boy. The boy has platinum blond hair and pale skin and doesn’t stop talking about his father. Harry doesn’t think he likes him._

_They’re in different—what’s it called, Houses?—and the rivalry is tense. Faintly, he remembers that this boy was the first boy of his age whom he’d met in this magical world, who’d told him about these Houses, about blood purity, and Harry thought it was a load of bollocks._

_He feels older in this dream, and he drinks a potion with that ginger boy in a girls’ bathroom and somehow he feels he knows what’s coming later, that this bathroom is important, that that pimply ghost on the U-bend is important, that there’s something—something about the sinks. But that’s not what he’s thinking of now, because when he goes to the sinks and looks at himself in the mirror, he’s big and beefy._

_“Ron,” he breathes—Ron, is that the ginger boy’s name? The ginger boy steps out of his own cell, except his not ginger and hardly a boy because he’s big and beefy too._

_The brown-haired girl whose name starts with an H and is at the tip of his tongue tells them to leave and they do, and they go after the pointy boy who talks about his father and Mudbloods and that evil man he calls You-Know-Who. He looks so ugly when he talks to them, sneering and frowning like there’s nothing else he’d like better in his life than to leave._

_The bit of Harry that’s stuck in reality wants him to fall asleep too, to dream, so he doesn’t look that way. That bit of Harry wishes that that boy wasn’t not like this, that maybe, in another life—in another dream, they could’ve been friends._

*

“Boy! Come out here!”

“What?” Harry thinks for a moment that his aunt and uncle and possibly Dudley have a present for him—it’s Christmas after all. But when he comes out, Uncle Vernon is glaring and Dudley is in the kitchen wolfing down holiday cookies as Petunia is cooking dinner for four this evening.

Harry’s heart leaps.

“Marge’s coming this afternoon and I need you to clean up the living room.” Uncle Vernon gestures to the room full of open Christmas wrappers and boxes, and Harry feels like a knife is stabbing into his chest. Uncle Vernon doesn’t even look guilty at his insensitivity instead just stares at Harry.

“Well?” he snaps, and Harry nods quickly and rushes over to bundle all the strewn Christmas trash into the rubbish bin.

He sees several of Dudley’s Christmas presents on the coffee table and floor and sofa—he hadn’t even bothered to put them away. A new television set, a stack of books (from a faraway relative, no doubt), a pet frog, a giant toy dinosaur—Harry thinks about nicking one of Dudley’s presents for a moment, and then he hears Uncle Vernon bark, “What are you doing just sitting there? Get to cleaning!”

Harry throws everything away and then spends the rest of the day in his cupboard. Outside he can smell Aunt Petunia’s delicious cooking, but tells himself that his dream holds better things as he forces himself to sleep.

*

_Christmases here—faintly, Harry thinks it’s called Hogwarts, or something of the sort—are beautiful. Snow cakes the grounds, and Harry isn’t with the Dursleys._

_An old man with a long white beard and purple starry robes pulls a firecracker, and out pops little white mice. Harry and the brown-haired girl gasp in amazement, as the old man chuckles and trades an ugly hat from his party treats for an even uglier hat from a man with a hook nose and greasy black hair._

_Harry doesn’t think he likes that man, much, but it’s Christmas and they’re here. A woman with crazy glasses and crazy hair says something about the thirteenth to leave this table will be the first to die, but—Harry would rather die here than live anywhere else._

  
*

And so first year goes. That smoking boy, Regan, comes back in the middle of January and Harry’s not fast enough to get away, so he gets a faceful of toilet every day, and gets locked in broom closets for hours, and misses classes, and returns to his room at least once a week with a bruise on his cheek or dried blood on his upper lip or forehead.

It gets to the point where he’s become numb, everything becomes numb.

But he counts on himself to fall asleep every day, in the end. It’s constant; he can return to it. He’s nearly failing his classes and no one— _no one_ —here likes him, but it’s not anything he needs.

He’s okay as long as he can drift back into unconsciousness.

*

_Diagon Alley. Harry thinks, after Hogwarts and his best friend’s house, this is his favorite place in the Wizarding World—with lights and magic everywhere, on display, for everyone to see. Harry wants to press his nose up against windows and just stare every time he comes here, even though he doesn’t because he’ll probably look like an idiot, or something._

_These weeks are bliss because he’s away from the Dursleys and he doesn’t have anyone to nag at him; he’s always worked better alone. He eats delicious ice cream from a magical ice cream shop with an owner who’s taken to him—but really, most people around here are a taken to him._

_It’s deep, incredibly deep down, but Harry likes that he is special. That he’s—happy, really. Just happy._

_But when he sees them again, his friends, because they’re something new sort of, still, and he remembers the birthday presents—oh, birthday presents!—and he remembers them and their names are on the tip of his tongue as he hugs them and a little bit about everything feels right._

*

_In this dream, he is sixteen. And that girl is here again, that beautiful red-haired girl, and Harry kind of wants to hold her hands, thinking that they’re soft and then getting surprised when he feels the callouses. He likes surprises like this._

_She is curled up against him as they sit by a large, dark lake—Ginny, he remembers her name being. “Ginny,” he says, and she looks up at him and he doesn’t know where to look, at her body or face or whatever’s inside the eyes that he can’t see. She smiles and puts her mouth against his and he presses back, feeling, tasting her warmth._

_“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this,” she says, and, in the back of his mind, he thinks, you don’t know how much I want to do this at all—_

*

He wakes up drenched in sweat and sighs. It’s summer before third year and he’s been doing nothing in his life, nothing but sleeping and dreaming and wanting.

“Boy!” Aunt Petunia’s bony knuckles rap on the door. “Come out! We need to talk!”

Harry groans; the cupboard hasn’t shrunken, but he’s grown, at least a little bit. Dudley’s grown loads, but Harry feels like he still has a way to go—he’s grown only maybe an inch, his shoulders a bit broader. He musses his hair and opens the cupboard door, shielding himself from the light—he thinks that maybe the only part of himself he likes is his hair, because it pisses Aunt Petunia off. He’d like his scar because it sort of looks like a lightning bolt, but he hates his parents too much for dying.

He trudges into the kitchen where Aunt Petunia is. “What?” he mumbles, sitting at the table.

“Don’t slouch!” Aunt Petunia smacks his head and Harry jerks back up. “We need to talk about your schooling. I got a report from your school that you’re failing drastically.”

“Really,” Harry murmurs.

“I received a note last year as well, but I didn’t think that you were _that_  much of a problem. You clearly are.” Aunt Petunia is cooking French toast; Harry can smell it. “You’re too troubled, boy.”

“What?” says Harry.

Aunt Petunia slams the frying pan on the table in front of him—for a moment, Harry thinks she’s going to feed him real food. “Trouble!” she says. “You’re trouble!” She picks the frying pan back up. “Honestly, the shit I do for my dead sister,” Harry hears her mutter.

“So what?” he can’t help saying, but Aunt Petunia’s already moved on and doesn’t hear him.

“You can’t go on like this—you need decent grades, or else you’ll never get your arse out of this house,” she says. “But you—you’re not normal, so you need to see someone about that.”

“Okay.” Harry wishes he could go back to sleep.

“So starting next year, you’ll be getting a therapist,” Aunt Petunia declares.

Harry stares at the wooden table. Suddenly he feels like school is going to be worse than home.

“Great,” he mumbles sarcastically, and Aunt Petunia bruising him with the frying pan doesn’t help in the least.

*

So added to his timetable is “Therapist Lessons” and it makes Harry roll his eyes and hide his paper from the other boys. Not that they pay attention—all much too busy with their own timetables, friends. He looks around the auditorium and a boy with blond hair catches his eye. He reminds Harry faintly of that pointy boy, except this boy isn’t pointy and his hair is a bit curly. The boy smiles at the eye contact and walks up to him.

Harry tries not to flinch.

“Schedules not getting any better this year, are they?” says the boy. “I like picking out my own lessons, but.” He clicks his tongue. “The lessons here are shit.”

Harry narrows his eyes. Why is this boy speaking to him?

“What classes are you in?” the boy asks.

Harry glances down to his timetable. “Biology, maths, English,” he mumbles. “Remedial business and finance.” He doesn’t mention his therapy sessions.

“Don’t you have two more? You’re a year eight, right?” says the boy. He tries to get a good look at Harry’s schedule. “All year eights have six classes.”

The principal of their school is making his way across the auditorium and kids are starting to sit down. Harry pushes past the boy pointedly and says, without looking back, “Excuse me,” and finds a seat between two other students who look too attentive about the back to school speeches.

He forgets about the boy for the rest of the day.

*

_When he’s asleep, he doesn’t have to wonder what it’s like having friends, because he has friends. And these two boys - they’re ginger, and they’re names are Fred and George and Harry likes them - they’re his friends. They’re his other friend’s brothers, yes (and Harry can remember their names now, and that ginger boy, his Best Friend, his name is Ron), but Harry is liked by people here. He’s liked._

_“Early Christmas for you, Harry,” says one of them, when the three are alone in an empty classroom together. He pulls out a piece of parchment and Harry stares at it._

_“What’s that supposed to be?” he asks._

_“This, Harry, is the secret of our success,” says the other, because they’re pranksters and know how to have fun and, oh, if only they were real. And not in his dream._

_“It’s a wrench, giving it to you,” says the first, “but we decided last night, your need’s greater than ours.”_

_(Isn’t it, but at least Harry has someone here to give him things.)_

_“Anyway, we know it by heart,” says the second. “We bequeath it to you. We don’t really need it anymore.”_

_And the next part isn’t even part of the dream, but Harry sees flashes of the words “MOONY WORMTAIL PADFOOT AND PRONGS” and he sees MOONY and a young man in a disheveled robe; WORMTAIL and a cowering man, a rat; PADFOOT and the dark handsome face with too much laughter for his eyes; and PRONGS he sees himself - no, not himself -_

*

“I know you might think this is pointless,” says his therapist.

His  _therapist_. Because Harry has a fucking therapist. He stares at his shoes and taps his feet.

“But I’m here for you to tell me whatever you want,” she says. She puts her folded hands on the table and looks Harry right in the eye, from behind her bright pink rimmed glasses to behind Harry’s thick round glasses. “Whatever you want,” she repeats.

“All right,” says Harry. “I hate this and I hate school and I hate the Dursley’s and I hate everything and I don’t know where to go.”

His therapist leans back. “That’s a good start,” she says.

Harry takes a deep breath. “And I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to be in school and I just don’t know - I don’t  _know_.”

“Good.” She’s nodding. “Keep going.”

He glares at her. “Do you  _want_  me to be upset? Do you like it? You get off on kids being sad or something? You—Are you some sort of sadist?” He’d learned the word over the summer after stealing one of Dudley’s books from his room. Dudley would never notice it being gone. Dudley probably didn’t even know that he owned books.

“Not in the slightest,” says his therapist. “But I like hearing how you feel. And I want to help you. And I think they’re the same thing.”

Harry stares at her.

*

_Voldemort. That’s his name. In the back of his mind, the part that might be semi-conscious, Harry thinks that he’s never remembered it because no one ever said it and that’s why he’s remembering now._

_They’re in a graveyard and Harry feels older than he is. The bald man - the white man, new of flesh and blood and gripping Harry’s heart - is laughing. Pointing a stick at him, firing off curses. Blue and green lights fill the air. Harry dives behind a gravestone._

_He’s caught. Blue light catches him. He screams, body filling with agonizing pain. It runs like electricity through his system, shocking every nerve ending, every piece of skin, every blood cell. He screams and screams until he can feel his heart burning out of his body, his throat ripping apart, and he screams louder than his own ears can hear._

*

Harry wakes up drenched in sweat, feeling hot and cold all at once. It’s the first time he’s had a nightmare, the first time he’s -

Surprised by the sound of snoring from the next bed over. His roommate is sleeping here for once. Harry wonders why he’s not where he usually is, with his mates, lounging in their rooms or something. But it’s really none of Harry’s business and he doesn’t care.

He falls back onto his bed, tries to breathe. Now that he thinks about it, the dream hadn’t been all that bad. He’d been tortured, yes - tortured, mutilated, nearly killed in a graveyard.

He remembers the wave of adrenaline. The blood pumping through his veins. He knows it isn’t real, but - it’d felt so good. So nice.

He closes his eyes and wants to dream of that again.

*

“You have friends in your dreams?” The therapist raises her eyebrows.

Harry nods. His knobby knees are pressed tight together, awkward hands folded on top of them. “Their names are Ron and Hermione,” he says, remembering. “They’re my best friends, I mean,” he clarifies. “I have more.”

“You have - a lot of friends in your dreams?” says his therapist. “And where - where is this? Some other correction school?”

“No, no,” says Harry. “This school of magic.” He smiles at the sound of that.

His therapist’s eyebrows nearly go into her hairline. “Magic,” she says flatly.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not mad,” says Harry. His smile disappears. “That’s what therapists are for, though, aren’t they? Mad people?”

“No, no, Mr. Potter, I never said you were mad,” she says, and the way she says  _Mr. Potter_  triggers something else in his memory, his dreams, but he keeps his mouth shut. “So you just dream a lot,” she says.

“All the time,” says Harry. “Well, I wish, but I have lessons and meals and things.” He crinkles his nose.

His therapist pushes her glasses down the bridge of her nose and looks up at him. “Your family pays for those, you know.”

“Yeah, right,” Harry snorts. “They pay the least they can for my education. Do you know where my cousin goes to school? Smeltings! Fucking Smeltings! And they send me here, to this awful place so they don’t have to see  _me_  in their faces all the time. Did you know that they didn’t even buy me a school uniform? They just dyed some of Dudley’s old clothes grey - ” He lifts up the large sleeve of the shirt he’s been wearing for the past three years ” - and I look like a freak! I wouldn’t be surprised if I went mad.” He sighs. “Maybe I am mad.”

When he looks up again, his therapist has her glasses off, eyes fixated on him, chin perched on her hands. Finally, after a moment, she says, “Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming, Mr. Potter?”

“I - what?” Harry has no idea what that has to do with his outburst.

“Lucid dreaming,” she repeats. “It’s when you are aware that you’re dreaming in your sleep and are able to take control of your dreams.”

“No,” says Harry, “I’ve never heard of that before. Is that - Is that what you think my dreams are?”

“I think it’s what you should  _try_ ,” she says. “Since you seem so reliant on your dreams - why not consciously take control of them? Dreams are a byproduct of your subconscious, after all.”

*

He does try it, a few nights later. She’d told him  _meditate, clear your mind before you sleep_. So he sits there and closes his eyes and does, even though he feels like a right wanker doing so.

Soon enough he falls into a deep sleep, a  _dream. He’s arguing with that blond, pointy boy because that boy had said something rude about his friend, the ginger one, Ron, and Ron is his friend and Harry is saying, “Get stuffed Malfoy… c’mon Ron…”_

_The pointy boy holds up a newspaper. His name flashes in Harry’s mind once - Draco. Malfoy. Malfoy says, “Oh yeah, you were staying with them this summer, weren’t you Potter? So tell me, is his mother really that porky, or is it just this picture?”_

_Harry sees visions of a plump, kind woman, feeding him lunches and breakfasts and dinners and calling him “dear” and patting his “cheek”, remembers a large envelope covered with stamps and a birthday cake the shape of a large, golden ball._

_His instinct is to lunge at this Malfoy boy, but instead something inside him tells him to say, “You know your mother, Malfoy, that expression she’s got, like she’s got dung under her nose?” Both he and his other friend, Hermione, are holding Ron back from doing exactly what Harry wants to do him. “Has she always looked like that, or was it just because you were with her?”_

_“Don’t you dare insult my mother, Potter,” says Malfoy._

_Harry tightens his grip on Ron and the three of them turn away. “Keep your big fat mouth shut then,” he says._

_There’s a loud bang, and then a flurry of things happen - when Harry wakes up, he won’t remember much of the details afterwards. All that’s vivid to him is that that Malfoy boy is now a furry white ferret and there’s a teacher to him - or at least, a man who’s supposed to look like a teacher - bouncing the Malfoy boy up and down and Harry wants to think it’s his lucid dreaming doing the work, except a part of him tells him that it’s not. That it’s part of the dream, part of the story._

_Everyone is laughing and Malfoy the Ferret is bouncing up and down and Harry feels lighter, like he’s part of this dream and part of him is not, and th_ en he’s awake and his eyes are open and he’s smiling in bed, staring at the ceiling.

*

“The best dream I had yet,” he tells his therapist at their session today. “I don’t know what happened, but - it was great.”

“You took control?” his therapist asks.

Harry shakes his head. “Wish I did, but - no. It just seemed like, everything happened because it was supposed to happen. Like I just triggered that particular dream at that particular time.” He smiles.

When he glances back to his therapist, she has a frown worried at her face. He asks, “What’s wrong?”

“What - oh, nothing,” she says, smiles. “Why don’t you tell me more about your dreams?”

*

So he sleeps more and tells her and flunks the rest of his classes, but doesn’t get expelled because his therapist tells him that he needs to get a hold of his schoolwork and he likes talking to her about his dreams, even if sometimes she looks at him like he’s mad. So he starts bringing his schoolwork to their meetings and does his homework there, and tells her about everything he sees when he closes his eyes.

“I have a godfather in my dream,” he says to her in November. “He’s named Sirius Black. He was arrested for being a murderer, but - he wasn’t guilty. He was just my parents’ best friend.” He smiles as he works on his math problem.

“What are your parents’ names in your dreams?” his therapist asks.

“The same as they are in real life,” says Harry. “Lily and James Potter.” He scratches a 2 onto his homework and remembers a brief dream where he and his dream-godfather are talking about his parents. There had been another man too but Harry can’t remember who he was.

At another session his therapist says, “Do you know if your dreams are in any order?”

“Oh, no, I don’t know,” says Harry. “I don’t think so. In some of them, I’m sixteen or seventeen. Other ones, I get dreams from when I’ve just started Hogwarts.”

“The name of your magic school?”

“Yeah. Funny name, isn’t it?” Harry chuckles and looks up from his history homework. His therapist forces a smile back at him.

“It’s strange, because I haven’t started remembering much about my dreams until this year,” he says at yet another meeting. 

“It may be because you’re maturing,” his therapist says. “There’s a theory that our dream memories become better the faster we age. Many teens and older people often mistake their dreams for reality.”

“I wish my dreams _were_  reality,” says Harry, turning a page in his history homework.

*

_Dementors. He remembers these too, these -_

_He’s thirteen and on a train and thrashing around on a seat. The strange thing about this dream is that he’s looking at himself from above, instead of being himself. He wonders what he’s seeing, thinking about; all he feels is a coldness like a grip at the back of his neck, and -_

_Still thirteen, this time at the edge of a lake. His godfather, Sirius, is right next to him. Dark cloaks descending, swirling around him, big and black and gone -_

_Fifteen this time, and wondering why he’s with Dudley. Why that, all of a sudden, and of all places, a dementor has come to Little Whinging. He tries to hold them off - no, he does -_

_“They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban,” he hears Aunt Petunia say, and wonders what his aunt knows anything about wizard prisons -_

_Two children, a stringy black-haired boy and a light strawberry blond girl under shadows of trees, and the boy says, “Dementors are for people who do really bad stuff - “_

*

“There are like,” says Harry, “creatures. In my dreams. I think they’re magical, but I don’t - I’ve never heard anything like them before. I think I made them up.”

“What kind of creatures?”

“Well there’s dementors,” says Harry, and shivers, “and thestrals, and dementors are like - fear, or something, and thestrals - you can see those if you’ve seen people die, and I guess in my dream I’ve seen people die because I know what they look like, big black winged horses - and blast-ended skrewts, and flobberworms, and hippogriffs and phoenixes - “

“Hippogriffs and phoenixes don’t sound made up,” says his therapist.

“No, I know they’re not,” says Harry. “But they’re in my dreams, too, and - Isn’t it  _amazing_ , what my mind can do?” he says, looking at his therapist as she gets up from her desk to grab something from her bookshelf. “My imagination? I should write a book on my dreams, I should. If only I could remember all of them in order.” He sighs. “I just want to sleep all the time.”

“Mr. Potter,” says his therapist, and his attention snaps to her. “You’ve been talking about nothing but your dreams since you’ve come back from your holidays.”

“Yeah, well.” Harry shrugs. “I did all the housework during the holidays and didn’t get any presents. What’s new?”

“And I am not particularly sure if dreaming all the time is healthy for you,” she continues.

Harry jumps up. “What - are you kidding me? It’s the only thing that makes me happy anymore! The only thing that keeps me living!”

His therapist’s eyes widen then - or maybe not, it’d only been a fraction of a second. Instead she says, “You’ve seen me for five months and nothing has changed about you. You’re still barely passing your classes, like you hardly put any effort into them.”

“What’s the point?” says Harry, rolling his eyes. “I might as well be expelled anyway. I don’t want to be here.” Talking has grown dull.

“I have these for you.” She sits down and Harry sits back down with her. She puts a bottle of pills on her desk, and they rattle.

Harry raises his eyebrows.

“Sleeping pills,” she says. “They prevent dreaming, supposedly, and allow you to fall into a deep sleep. They’re supposed to be prescribed for those who have difficulty sleeping, and - in a sense - I feel that this applies to you.”

Harry snorts. “If I had difficulty sleeping - “

“Sleeping is supposed to allow you to rest, allow you to center in on your subconsciousness,” she says. “You are not doing that. You are moving, creating with your mind when you close your eyes. That is not sleep. You need to preserve your energy and rest.”

Harry bites his lip and nods. He doesn’t tell her that resting, centering on subconsciousness - that’s what feeling awake is like. It may make him sound like he’s actually gone mad.

*

He  _wants_  to dream but - who knows what these pills would do? Perhaps she had been right; perhaps dreaming is bad for him, no matter how much he wants to do it. 

He stares at his scrawny little body in the bedroom mirror. His roommate is out again, presumably having made amends with his fellows, or something. Harry feels the urge to jerk off, so he does, against the sink and wipes his cock and the porcelain with tissues when he’s done. He’s tempted to jerk off again into his roommate’s bed but decides that he’s not that type of person.

Instead, he goes to bed with only his pants on and grabs the pills from his bedside, pops the dosage into his mouth, and then closes his eyes. Prepares himself for a dreamless sleep.

*

_And Patronuses, they’re the ones to ward off the dementors - “To protect you,” Harry is saying to a pretty Asian girl, at one of their meetings, meetings in secret and from the Ministry and Harry is a leader._

_And this pretty girl is smiling at him and Harry remembers dates, remembers dates going wrong. But he also remembers sidelong glances and smiles and this is different from the other dreams about that redhead girl, Ginny, because this Asian girl just makes him want to kiss her but nothing more. He thinks of first kisses anyways, messy, wet first kisses under mistletoe and they’re actually not quite bad -_

_“How was it?” Ron is asking._

_“Wet,” Harry answers, and Ron laughs and Harry remembers the other times Ron has laughed, and this time last year when Ron hadn’t laughed, hadn’t spoken to Harry at all -_

_Suddenly everything falls into place and Harry remembers dragons and mermaids and mazes from last year, giants and laws and big black veils this year, and phoenixes and snakes and big large tunnels from when he was twelve -_

*

He’s jolted awake. Everything makes sense now - snippets from old dreams and newer dreams and possibly future dreams flood to him and hit him and he can’t remember them all but _could_ , could if he mapped them all out in front of him -

*

His therapist is fired in April. Something about not being effective enough; but Harry still has the sleeping pills. He’s tempted to use them again, but afraid of what else they will bring. His dream after taking them the first time had been bizarre, like he was living a whole life all over again, and - surprising that so much time can pass when you’re dreaming, yet it’s so little time.

When summer comes, he packs his bags and goes home to the Dursleys. He locks himself in his cupboard for the next three months - he’s starting to grow, he knows, but he still fits.

He thinks about one of his recurring dreams from this year. After that graveyard one - he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. The pain that had filled his body. It had felt so - real, and each time after he wakes up from it, he craves for that same kind of energy, that same kind of spark, like - like he’s dying.

On one of the days when the Dursleys are out at some sort of lawn competition, he slips out of his cupboard. They haven’t even set any rules on him, because he’d been so keen on avoiding them and they’d barely complained, if only calling him out every so often to clean the house. It’s mostly spotless nowadays, though, as Aunt Petunia has fallen into a routine of cleaning it since the empty days during the school year.

Harry goes to the stove and, carefully, after examining the nobs, turns one on. Then another, and another, until all five swatches are on and five little flames are dancing between the iron rungs. Harry bends down and examines them from the side - they’re beautiful, yellow coated with blue, reflecting in his glasses. Harry climbs onto the counter and can feel their heat through the surface.

He gently places himself against the iron - pain spikes immediately, and he screams. It’s delicious, the way they prick at his back, like a thousand knives of water or the torturous flames of a million candles, and Harry can feel his skin slicing. Sweat sliding against his forehead and down his bare back. He hopes it doesn’t put out the fires. He smells something burning, but it’s drowned by the feeling of fire covering him like a coat and he wants to roll into it and wonders when his throat has stopped working, has gotten so sore -

*

“It wasn’t us, it wasn’t us, it was his fault, the stupid boy’s fault!” 

He hears Aunt Petunia sobbing - no, not sobbing, protesting. He tries to wake up but his eyelids feel too heavy. 

His back feels like hell. This bed is too comfortable.

“We didn’t do anything, we were out!” his aunt is saying. “He’s practically old enough anyways, he usually stays in his room - “

 _Cupboard_ , thinks Harry,  _a stupid fucking cupboard._

“We’ll let you off with a warning, ma’am,” he hears someone say in an official voice - a doctor, perhaps. “But the next time something like this happens without an adult in the house, you will be in legal trouble with child abuse and child neglect.”

“Yes, yes,” Aunt Petunia says, in a tone like she’s thinking _, that boy is so much trouble_.

*

“They said that he tried to kill himself over the summer.”

“Commit suicide?”

“In a fire? The little freak.”

Whispers surround him as he starts year nine but Harry pretends not to hear - he doesn’t care, because what’ll they do to him?

Beat the shit out of him, evidently.

“You really do know your worthless, don’t you?” says the boy when they’re behind the school when they should be in Physics. Harry should be, at least. “You know what I heard? You tried to kill yourself back in July.”

Harry doesn’t tell him that it’d been his birthday present to himself.

“So why didn’t you?” says the boy. He’s a year ten, but Harry’s a year nine this year and Regan and his gang have barely passed secondary school. “Chicken out?”

Truthfully, Harry doesn’t know. He remembers blacking out, and then waking up. The burnt flesh at his back had been the only proof that he’d done it.

“You should’ve gone through with it,” says the boy, and kicks Harry in the face and leaves him there for the rest of the period.

*

Harry lies in his bed, his hand on his prick. He’d been thinking about tits, earlier, and then pussy, and then wanking off had felt like nothing but something robotic to him.

He rolls over onto his side and grabs the bottle of sleeping pills. Weighs them in his hand. He thinks about the words that had been thrown at him earlier today - this week, really.

He pops the cap off his bottle and drowns into sleep.

A few  _minutes later, he’s walking down the corridor with Ron and they’re talking about Quidditch or - something or other, and then he sees Ginny and a dark boy. The name Dean registers in his mind, and his insides feel frozen as, distantly, he hears Ron say, “Oi!”_

_Ginny has been in his dreams since the beginning, has been - he sees flashes of her face, young and innocent, holding her mother’s hand and saying, “Look, Mum, it’s Harry Potter!” Of Ginny lost and red and not waking up. Of singing Valentines and flushed faces and -_

_Her lips pressed against the dark boy’s and Harry wants to scream and tear them apart. Instead they break apart and Ginny says, “What?” and Harry wants to take her and taste her and -_

_“I don’t want to find my own sister snogging in public!”_

_“This was a deserted corridor until you came butting in!”_

_He doesn’t know where to look - there’s Ron, of course, and he has flashes of memories that didn’t happen, memories of staring at the top of his bed and debating between Her and Him, memories of worrying about Ron and Ginny and mostly Ron, of “he’s your best mate” and “but he should be supportive.” Ron looks furious and Dean looks embarrassed and Ginny looks beautiful, hair bright and flaming._

_“Er, c’mon Ginny,” says Dean, “let’s go back to the common room…”_

_Harry thinks of Dean and Ginny in the common room, of Ginny in the common room, of all the things they could do in the fucking common room, of all the fucking they could do - he wants to reach out and grab Dean by his neck  and wrangle him away -_

*

He wakes up out of breath. This is strange; he’s never been this high-strung after a dream before. He sits up and wipes his forehead, thinks about that Ginny girl in his dream.

He’s hard again.

He slips his hand down his pants, sees that imaginary girl in his mind. Long red hair, big brown eyes. Freckles dusting her cheeks and body. Imagines her curves and her tits and what might be under her skirts - even though she hadn’t even been wearing a skirt in his dream, but he can imagine.

His hand works faster and he ruts against his mattress, opens his mouth silently against his pillow as he comes. His pants are sticky but he’s too spent to move or change them. He’ll regret this in the morning, he knows. He reaches for the box of tissues at his bedside and wipes his hand before tossing it to the ground.

He doesn’t take any pills the second time he goes to sleep. Dreaming is a different experience again, though.

*

“Mr. Potter,” says his physics teacher after class.

Harry stays behind and the other students file out the door. His teacher orders the papers together and points at the seat in front of his desk.

“Sit.”

Harry sits.

“Mr. Potter,” his teacher says again, pacing in front of the blackboard. “Are you aware that you are failing my class?”

“I’m failing all of my classes,” Harry mutters, rolling his eyes.

“Mr. Potter,” his teacher says for the third time and dear lord it’s annoying. “If you do not pass, I will hold you back.”

“Can you even do that?” says Harry.

“I can,” his teacher says sternly, “and I will. You look like you’re about to fall asleep in every class and never turn in your homework.”

“Because I don’t do my homework,” says Harry.

“You fail all your exams,” his teacher continues. “Sometimes you don’t even write anything on your exam sheet!”

“Are you done pointing out the obvious?” says Harry.

His teacher stops and narrows his eyes. He points the tube of rolled up paper at Harry.

“If you don’t pass this class, you will get held back,” he says. “You’ll never make it to university, never get a job, never become a functioning  _adult_. You’ll be living at home with your mum and your dad like some sort of parasite, growing fat on couches and living in your old childhood bedroom. You’ll - “

“Clearly this is a waste of time, so if you’ll excuse me,” says Harry, standing up out of his seat and slinging his tattered backpack over his shoulder. His teacher makes to follow him, but Harry swivels around so that they’re face-to-face, practically nose-to-nose.

“My mum and dad are  _dead_ ,” he says. “And I don’t even have a fucking old childhood bedroom, because I’ve always lived in the stair cupboard my entire life. I don’t plan on becoming an adult, I don’t plan on living a full life, because I am  _done_. My entire life is shit, and you better do some fucking research before you come up here and insult my future.”

He leaves the classroom and thinks of better things he could be doing right now. Like sleeping.

*

_Water. That’s all he sees. Water, and he should be drowning, suffocating - he’s never learned how to swim - but when he breathes, he breathes fine and thinks that air might burn his lungs if he were above the water._

_There are weird creatures down here and large, seaweed-like plants—he kicks them, fights them off. But he sees other people who don’t belong down here too, like the head of a shark but the body of a man, and a boy and a girl encased entirely by a bubble. The girl falls back, he knows, and Harry makes his way through the plants and the biting animals and the water and the water and the water._

_It’s dark and sort of grey-green; he doesn’t know how long he’s been here. But he comes to a clearing where he sees his best friend - he sees Ron, along with that pretty Asian girl and Hermione and a small blond girl. They’re all tied up against rocks and his instinct is to cut them all free - but then a merman and his spear cut in front of him and he’s told he can save only one of them, from drowning down here._

_It doesn’t seem fair, but -_

*

He’s being shaken awake, and then hit, and Harry kicks around as his roommate says, “Stop, stop, Potter, are you up?”

“Yeah, I’m fucking up,” Harry grumbles, looking at his roommate through blurs. Where are his glasses? He fumbles with them at his bedside. “What did you wake me for? I was having a good dream.”

“Well you were also kicking and screaming in your sleep, in case you wanted to know,” his roommate says, with maybe a bit too much venom in his voice. He glances over at the sleeping pills at Harry’s bedside. “You’re taking those?”

“I - not all the time,” Harry says, wondering why he’s being so honest with his roommate whom he’s hardly exchanged more than ten sentences with.

“Then why do you have them?” his roommate asks.

Harry looks at them. They’re not even halfway done, and the size of Harry’s palm.

“To help me sleep better,” he murmurs, and falls back into his dreams, before his roommate can say much more to him.

*

It’s the weekend and the other students are either visiting their families back at home or socializing outside of their dorms. There aren’t any lakes here in the middle of the country, but there’s a swimming pool and Harry decides it’ll do. He brings an extra pair of pants and an overlong coat for a towel.

He slides into the water. He wonders where any of the swim coaches or lifeguards have gone, but figures that mostly swimmers and their coaches come here anyway, not anyone else. Swimming is as much of a recreational sport at Stonewall as is every other sport, except maybe football, the only one taken seriously. The others are for socializing, or so Harry figures, as he wouldn’t really know.

He sinks in and lets the water wash across his arms and shoulders, soaked down to his shirt and socks and jeans. In the back of his mind he wonders why he hadn’t taken his clothes off, but figures it doesn’t matter if he comes into the water either bathed or naked. That doesn’t matter - it’s the water he craves, and he sinks down and water brims at his eyelids, closed off by his lips instinctively pressed together.

He opens his eyes. His glasses slip off, but it doesn’t make a difference: everything is blurry underwater. He remembers how it’d felt in his dream, and calms down - sighs, inaudibly, as little bubbles stream from his lips and nose. He has to adjust to this has to - he can’t block it off, and the water is forcing him upward. He pushes himself back down and tries looking through the fuzzy blue, until his eyes are burning and his throat feels blocked off,

but he doesn’t break up for water, no matter how much his lungs are screaming for him to. He opens his mouth and inhales; water pierces his insides like blades and Harry remembers briefly how it’d felt being on that stove. He opens his mouth again and everything inside him is screaming to stop, to  _GET OUT_  and it feels like there’s an iron weight on his chest but he doesn’t, he lets himself sink because he’s in a bath that’s filled with bubbles, and -

\- no, now he’s by the edge of a lake inside a cavern and trying to scoop all the water he can into a basin because there’s a man who’s dying behind him, a man who’s protected him and is the only person he has left right now, here, and everything’s so dark and a pale white hand shoots out of the water, which -

_\- cold grips his insides and numbs every bit of his body and he struggles, tries to pull himself out but he can’t because there’s something down there, something he needs, something that’s glistening at the bottom of the icy pool and he grips onto it, but something around his neck catches onto a rock and he’s suffocating, like nails digging into his neck -_

“Potter! Potter!” a voice is shouting, and then a tightness around his neck before it loosens again. Harry gasps and air fills his lungs, almost like pained relief - he opens his eyes and sees the blurred outline of a person. No - of many people, hovering over him.

“Potter, are you okay?” says the woman who sounds like his maths teacher. Harry remembers faintly that she is one of the coaches of the swim team.

“I’m fine,” he says, voice croaking out hoarse and wishes he were back in his dream again, drowning, again.

*

He barely passes year nine and picks his GCSEs by the well-known method of closing his eyes and pointing at random. He remembers in his dreams that he’d wanted to be a policeman of some sort, a magical one - nothing he could be in the real world, because no one in their right mind would want Harry to work for them. 

Over the summer he stays away from Vernon and Petunia, and one day when they’re not looking - although they hardly ever look at him now, as he holes himself up in his cupboard which he now takes half the space of - he goes downtown and buys himself a lighter with the money that he’d collected from being strewn around the house. He doesn’t have enough money for anything else, though, so on another day when Dudley’s out getting his fix with his friends like Piers and Dennis and Malcolm, he nicks one of the many packs of cigarettes from Dudley’s room and steals away near Magnolia Crescent to smoke.

The first time he does it is the first week of summer and he pulls away coughing, wondering why anyone would want to do this. He doesn’t stop though because it’s not like he has anything better to do, and the burning in his throat is maybe like the sensation of butterscotch running down his throat, or burning alcohol, or the warm snapping of chocolate after falling into a pit of fear and darkness.

He finishes the cigarette, it burning away at the end, and then he flicks it to the ground. Its ashes burn against the concrete and he stomps it out to black. He looks at the other cigarettes, and then pulls a second out and lights that up too.

It’s not like sleeping and it’s not like dreaming and it doesn’t come close at all. But it does feel damn good and Harry figures that since he’s forced to stay awake and live, he may as well treat himself to something that makes him feel lighter inside.

*

He manages to make himself not smell like smoke every time he comes back from walking around Magnolia Crescent, and slips through the back door with the key he’d nicked in the summer after year eight. He tucks himself into his cupboard and locks himself in the dark, not even bothering to turn the light on even though the switch light reaches his shoulders when he stands.

It’s been a lonely summer like always and Harry strips off his trousers, worms his hand into his pants. He’s warm and needs some sort of release, and starts thinking of nothing into particular as he wanks himself off - snippets of his dreams, maybe, like sitting in his friend Ron’s house with Ron and Hermione, or diving into a swirly liquid at the bottom of a basin, or putrid classrooms in cold dark dungeons. Yes - this is good, and Harry grunts and presses his forehead against the wall of his cupboard as he comes in spurts in his hand. This is good, anything is good -  _feeling_ is good, like he has something to desire.

He sighs and flicks the light switch on. It’s dim; he’d recently changed the lightbulb this summer, after finding cases of them in the garage. It’d been broken before and he hadn’t been able to reach the top of his cupboard so comfortably until this summer. Too comfortably, perhaps, but Harry doesn’t think about that.

He still has pills left in the bottle his therapist had given him two years ago. He thinks of her and smiles; he wonders what she’s doing now. In retrospect, he supposes he never liked her. Hated her maybe, even. She always said too much and too little and Harry doesn’t know how she was supposed to make him feel better. She may have even made him feel worse.

Still, the pills. He hasn’t taken them at all this summer - only several times, in the past school year. He remembers the feeling he’d gotten after taking them, a feeling like diving deep down and then breaking up for air when waking up. 

His fingers wrap around the bottle and he pops it open.

*

_He’s in a courtroom now. Panic is at his chest; he tries not to breathe too fast, and then wonders if he’s breathing at all._

_That old man walks in. Harry remembers his name being Dumbledore. Dumbledore won’t look at him._

_Harry knows something is wrong but it doesn’t matter because the judgment flies by and then he’s elated and the Dumbledore man still won’t look at him but it doesn’t matter. He talks with a Minister and a pointy man resembling - no, is the father of that Malfoy boy, and then he’s back at a home that’s not the Dursley’s and there’s singing and then he’s on a train to go to school and everything is flashing by like snapshots and Harry thinks,_ thinks  _he might know everything that’s happening but he’s not sure because at the same time he’s forgetting -_

_*_

“I knew it,” says a voice, and Harry doesn’t have time to hide his cigarette when Dudley comes around the corner. A cigarette is in his own mouth.

Harry sighs. “Yeah, all right, so I stole a pack. So what? You got a shitload more.”

Dudley has his hands in his pockets and walks up to him. “I have to say, I’m impressed, Potter. I never took you as the smoking type.”

“Well there’s a load you don’t know about me, okay?” When Harry thinks about it, he realizes there’s really nothing special about him.

“Never said I did. So how’s it going, cuz?” says Dudley, leaning against the wall with him. “Stonewall doing you good? You look like you have toilet hair.”

“At least I look a fat load better than you,” mutters Harry, taking his cigarette out and tapping the ashes off. He exhales a stream of smoke after a moment.

Dudley considers him for a moment. “Has that school messed you up or something?” he asks, and it sounds like, even if the smallest bit, that there’s worry in his voice.

Harry’s laugh is hollow. “Even if it has, I won’t even come as half as messed up as you,” he says. “Perfect little mummy’s boy, ickle Diddykins by day and badass Big D at night, beating up year eights with his gang like a real grown up.”

He doesn’t know why he’s said this because, all things considered, he  _is_  more of a freak than Dudley is. Dudley’s face goes dark red and any worry Harry thought might’ve flashed in his eyes before is gone.

“You’re right, I do beat up year eights,” he says to Harry, advancing on him. “And year nines, and tens, and elevens, and, oh, you know who else? My own cousin.” He hits Harry in the face before Harry has the chance to move away, and his knuckles practically break Harry’s jaw apart. Dudley knees him and Harry falls to the ground and Dudley throws in a good few punches to his stomach, and then steps on the back of his knee for good measure. Harry does his best not to cry out in pain, although a pathetic sound escapes his lips.

“And that’s what you get for stealing my cigarettes,” says Dudley, kicking the pack that had fallen out of Harry’s pocket over to his stiff hand. 

*

It could be worse. Harry brings the cigarettes with him to school and smokes instead of eating, passing off the red rings and bags around his eyes as tiredness. He’s brought his sleeping pills as well and his grades fall so drastically this year that it’s like he doesn’t even have grades.

A guidance counselor calls him into her office during the third week of September and says that’s imperative that he actually works towards his grades this year, his GSCE year. He tells her to fuck off and that it’s not like he’ll get anywhere in life anyways, and skips the next period to smoke outside and relieve himself of his sudden headache.

This year he’s also started using his sleeping pills more, regularly, first with the “assigned dosage” until it doesn’t feel like they’re working, like it’s  _enough_. Shortly after his meeting with the guidance counselor, he starts taking double the dosage - and then triple, until he can fall into the sleep within seconds, and wake up like he’s lived already.

His dreams go  _in patterns, and in one of them he’s flying high in the air because this is Quidditch, a magical sport, a sport that he’s good at not at all like football or rugby where there’s too much contact, but on brooms and Harry is quick and agile, skilled and everyone loves him for it. He dodges balls that fling themselves at him and looks around, spots that little golden ball within moments and he dives at it -_

_\- he’s bigger in this one, with a big old Captain’s badge on his chest and he’s yelling at one of his teammates for trying to show one of the Beaters how to hold his bat and Harry should be having a good time up here, really, except this prat is being an idiot and one of those mad balls is flying straight towards him and Harry thinks, for a moment, wait, this isn’t what I’m up here for -_

_\- another one, his first one. He swivels around bodies looking for that tiny golden ball, always running after him, like he’ll never catch it, and briefly he wonders how long he has, because this game could take forever. He hopes that he’s not too slow, that he’ll catch it sometime today, because - and then his broom is jerking him madly, dangling him in the air. Fear claws at his chest - oh no, oh no, oh no, he’s doing to die, die like some helpless human even though he’s only eleven years old but a hundred feet off the ground and hanging and -_

_\- thirteen in this one, thirteen because this is the one where there’s a big storm and he sees a large dog, in the stands, in the sky, and faintly he can hear his mother’s screams, flashes of green light, and then he’s falling and falling and enveloped by fear…_

_… and he should be waking up, but he’s not. He lands in darkness - a house? This dream may have been triggered by that green light, perhaps. There’s an old woman and she’s not saying anything - she’s hissing, and Harry understands her. He understands, and then she has fangs and a snake is growing out of her skull and her face falls apart and Harry can hear his mother’s screams again - “Not Harry, please not Harry!” “Stand aside you silly girl!” and Harry tries, tries to call out to his mother, tries to get away from the snake because it’s suffocating him_

_and then all he can see is broken wood. In hands, in small bags, and his face feels wet from maybe wind and rain or maybe he isn’t wet at all but he thinks about flying and houses, shaky houses and dusty black houses and ruined forgotten houses and flying, the feeling of being in the air and falling to the ground like a broken tree branch…_

*

When he wakes up, it’s noon.  _Fuck_ , he thinks, because he’s slept through three classes - but, then, what does it matter when he’s failing all his classes anyway?

The sleeping pills are a godsend but he runs out of them quickly, so he sneaks into the back room of the campus health center and nicks a bottle when no one’s looking. They sometimes help him go to sleep in between his smoking, when he can feel his lungs burn black and shrivel up and die. They make him feel good, almost match up to his sleeping.

He’s called to the dean’s the last week of October. The dean paces behind his desk and says, “You’re failing terribly this semester, Mr. Potter. If you don’t put in more effort, we may need to expel you.”

“I’d recommend that you do,” Harry says, bored. He’s itching for a cigarette right now. “I’m a waste of space here, anyways.”

The dean sighs and then stops, put his hands on his desk and looks at Harry seriously. “That’s not what I’m trying to say here, Mr. Potter,” he says. “I don’t want to expel you. I want you to do well.”

“Yeah, well you’re hopeless right there,” says Harry, “because if you haven’t seen my record for the past four years I’ve been here, you shouldn’t expect much from me. Or anything at all, really.”

“I have seen your record,” the dean says patiently. “I noticed that your grades were a bit higher in year eight - “

Harry snorts.

The dean tilts his head. He almost looks concerned, but Harry scoffs at this - no one is concerned about him. “Do you have a learning disorder, Mr. Potter?” he asks, and Harry does outright snort.

“Even if I did, would you send me to someone to ‘help’ me?” he says. “A load of ‘help’ - ” he uses the air quotes this time ” - that’d be. And why won’t it get through your thick skulls that maybe I just don’t give a damn about school?”

“You are extremely close from being expelled, Mr. Potter,” says the dean. But he sighs. “However, I am allowing an exception in your case for a second chance. If you do not bring yourself to even a passable mark by the end of the semester, you will be booted from the school.”

“Thank the bloody lord,” says Harry, pushing himself out of his chair and rolling his eyes. He leaves the dean’s office.

*

_He’s eating treacle tart and he and Ron and Hermione are downstairs in the kitchens - Hermione’s going on about a club saving house elves and Harry and Ron are rolling their eyes -_

_\- house elves -_

_\- house_

_elves -_

_Dobby. And Harry’s twelve again, staring into the bushes where a pair of tennis ball green eyes are staring back at him and then he’s in Dudley’s old bedroom and that elf introduces itself as Dobby and Harry stops thinking of it as an it and then as a he and then -_

_\- Quidditch and that Bludger flying at him, and -_

_\- Hospital Wing, running into brick walls, stacks of letters from friends -_

_\- a sock, giving Dobby a sock and a diary and that older Malfoy man and Dobby is joyful and Harry thinks, another friend, I’ve made another friend -_

_\- back in the kitchens and Harry meets another House Elf named Winky and Harry sees a man with a disfigured face, a young man and Voldemort and - no, that’s not what this is about -_

_\- words flash in his eyes and ears like Room of Requirement and chamber pots and barmy old codger -_

_\- he sees silver, blood spilling out of a tiny little chest, at the edge of a sea -_

_\- treacle tart, treacle tart and pie and food and Harry is thanking him and getting a large horrendous painting of himself for Christmas and socks, he sees socks everywhere -_

*

Harry tries to fight back this year. Kids leave him alone as they always do when there are year elevens and twelves to kick around; but sometimes they come to him to remind him that they haven’t forgotten, that they can still pick on Harry even if he’s older.

Harry manages to throw three punches at the gang’s leader before two members pin him down and the leader, with a split lip and a bruised eye and a bloodied nose, bends down so that their faces are centimeters apart. Harry recognizes him - the same one from last year, has only a year on him. His breath is putrid and Harry’s is probably worse. 

“Putting up a fight now, Potter?” he says. “I like that.” He steps on Harry’s chest and Harry can feel his ribs breaking. His lungs feel twisted. “It might actually be a challenge,” says the gang leader, “if you had some friends to back you up.”

He laughs and the rest of the gang laughs and he steps on Harry’s shoulder, on his neck. Harry can feel the blood clog his throat, and he tries to choke some out. Tries to get up.

The gang leaves and Harry abandons his attempts to get up, just lies there until he thinks he has his energy back. Or - not, but he can’t stay out here forever. He treads to his dormitory; going to classes in this state would earn him nothing but scold looks and more detentions that he’ll be forced to skip. Nurses would ask questions and Harry’ll be even worse - the boys always manage to find out things like this.

He wanders into the bathroom. His eyes are bloodshot - his hair is messy, uneven from Harry’s many previous amateur cuts. His skin looks so pale and gaunt and Harry wonders when had been the last time he’d eaten - he faintly remembers eating treacle tart, despite that he doubts that their school even serves it. He takes his shirt off - and immediately his ribs burn, he nearly doubles over in pain. Carefully, he manages to get it off to see the dark bruises and red splotches all over his body. 

He looks fucking awful.

But it reminds him of something - a dream he’d had, where a snake - no, where  _he’d_  attacked a man with his - no, it’d been a snake, with his teeth, and - the man had been ginger, Ron’s father, and - Harry barely manages to put his shirt back on, and then trudges out of the bathroom, picking up speed by the second because adrenaline grips him suddenly and he remembers.

Remembers hearing earlier this year when a boy had boasted to one of his friends that he’d managed to sneak a pocketknife into the school. Harry’s eyes drift over to room 209 in the hallway. He steals away to his own room for a paperclip, and then, with careful skill and precision from never put to use practice done at the Dursleys, he gets the room open. The knife is in plain sight on the boy’s desk, and Harry grabs it.

The - he remembers his English teacher from last year having orange hair, and red, bright red flashes in his eyes. Harry’s walking faster now, forgetting about his injured body, everything - all he can see is that man from his dreams lying on the ground, blood spilling out of him, and - the strange thing about this dream is that it’d felt like he’d been asleep even more when having it, and it’s a bit more faint - only a bit, though.

He goes into the teacher’s building. Campus is completely silent, everyone still in their classes, but Harry keeps the knife in his pocket. Climbs up the stairs with his inexplicable energy, until he’s on the right floor, and then to his old teacher’s office. He’s glanced into the doorway when he realizes that two things are wrong: his teacher’s back isn’t turned, and if he does anything remotely violent, he’ll be sent to jail.

His teacher also has brown hair.

Harry nearly stabs himself through his shirt. _Fuck_  - how could he have missed this? Forgotten? He turns back around and starts slower down the hallway, fingers tightening around the knife in his jacket. What’s he supposed to do now? He feels like shit and most of the adrenaline has left his body, and - 

Harry stops in his tracks. Another teacher has just left his office - an orange-haired one. Almost instinctively, his hand goes right for the pocketknife and then he’s on the teacher’s back, stabbing him repeatedly in the neck. Pictures from the dream  _flash before his eyes, teeth diving at the man’s neck -_

Over and over again, bright red blood on his hands and fingers and clothes,  _blood on the ground and the man_  collapses and Harry can see his face, see him passing out for the second, _and he’s about to deliver the final blow, baring his_  knife and aiming right for the man’s neck -

He hears footsteps climbing up the stairs, and then from one end of the hall - panicking, Harry wipes the pocketknife with his sleeve and then sprints in the opposite direction, running down the second staircase, black and white in the back of his eyelids. In the distance he can hear others screaming, others shrieking - in his mind, families huddled together and crying - and it feels so real, like he’d actually stabbed the man, like  _he’d actually bit him, had become a snake_.

*

“What do you mean, our school doesn’t have winter dances?” Harry frowns. His roommate is looking at him funnily; somehow they’ve reached a level of civility. Perhaps it’d come after sharing space for the past few years, despite that they’ve never actually talked.

“It’s never had any dances,” his roommate says, folding his laundry. “What are you on?”

Harry’s frown deepens. “Don’t try that rubbish on me,” he says. “Didn’t we have a school dance last year? With music and all that?”

“No,” says his roommate.

“And I went with - ” Harry thinks for a moment. An Indian girl, who’d looked quite pretty, although he can’t remember her name. He can’t even think of why a girl would want to go with him, but this is what he remembers.

“But I danced,” Harry says. “And then there was - a beetle in the courtyard - “

“What are you talking about?” says his roommate.

“The  _dance_ ,” says Harry. “We had a dance, here, at our school, and I went with a girl - “

“That’s impossible,” says his roommate.

“How? What do you mean it’s impossible?”

“Potter,” his roommate says, and Harry hears different voices saying  _Potter - Potter! - POTTER!_  - ”This is a school only for blokes,” his roommate says. “There aren’t any girls here.”

“But there must’ve been,” mutters Harry. “There must’ve… I swear…”

“You’re going mad,” says his roommate, shaking his head. “And isn’t it late for you? Isn’t this when you usually go to sleep?”

“Oh, right,” says Harry, leaning back on his pillow. He reaches for his sleeping pills, and then dumps a copious amount into his hand. His roommate glances at him but doesn’t say anything - they’ve already established the mutual lack of caring for each other. Harry shoves the pills in his mouth and grabs his water to swallow them in one gulp. He doesn’t even count how many he takes anymore - just enough that he doesn’t even have time to even breathe before falling into his dreams, his sleep.

*

The holidays roll around and Harry is at the Dursley’s, yet again. There’s no option for him to stay at the school - if there was, he’d have taken it.

This year they need help setting the Christmas tree because Vernon’s back had thrown out while Harry and Dudley had been at school, and of course neither Dudley nor Petunia would do it. So Harry drags himself out of the cupboard to the living room where Vernon is reading his newspaper in front of the fireplace, feet propped up on a stool, and Harry sets the tree up.

It takes only a few minutes, but Harry glances at the fire and immediately thinks of the green lights. His parents, and their death. In his dreams, they’d been murdered.

Harry sort of prefers that to the car crash.

“Vernon,” he says to his uncle, and his uncle grunts from the chair.

“My parents died in a car crash, right?” Harry says.

Vernon’s beady little black eyes look up from the newspaper, bugs amidst his walrus mustache. “Of course,” he snaps. “They’ve been dead for fourteen years.”

“There’s no way it’d been - they died in another way, right?” says Harry.

Vernon snorts. “Like what?” he says, returning to his newspaper. “In a fire? Blowing themselves up? No, your parents were stupid, and intoxicated, and got themselves in an accident. Next thing - or, at least, according to the doctors - they were dead. Simple as that.”

Harry looks at his uncle in the firelight. Never before in his life has he hated his uncle as he does now. He kicks the stool out from under Vernon’s feet, and steals away to his cupboard before Vernon has the time to shout at him.

*

The pills, the pills, the pills. Harry doesn’t know when but somehow they’ve become a lifeline to him this year. He takes them day by day and doesn’t measure how much each time - this is probably damaging, but he’s still smoking so what difference will it make? Wake and smoke fill him during the days and adrenaline and weight pull him into his darkest dreams. His hand is getting bigger, too, maybe, and maybe he’s taking more.

He should be expelled sometime soon - it’s the middle of January, and the semester ends in mid-February - and Harry takes so many pills in one night that when he wakes up, his clock says that it’s Thursday when he’s sure yesterday had been Monday.

“You didn’t wake up,” his roommate tells him that afternoon.

“What? Last night?” says Harry.

“All day,” says his roommate. “Yesterday. And the day before.” His eyebrows crease but Harry feels something fill him. Something that makes him want to take the pills again, more, and even  _more_ , until he knows nothing but them -

_- he’s standing in front of a mirror with a crimson stone in his hand and a man with two faces is yelling at him, screaming at him, touching him and burning him and Harry shoves his hand in the man’s face, watching as the man’s body crumbles away -_

_\- in a large dark tunnel with a giant snake chasing him and Harry has nothing but a sword and one of the snake’s fangs digs deep into his arm and Harry screams, screams as the venom runs through his blood and in the corner of his eye he sees a tattered old hat and a flash of gold and perhaps red -_

_\- surrounded by the dementors again, and again, and then no longer surrounded by them but facing them and he waves his wand, a Patronus shooting out of it and Sirius’s grinning face flashes in front of his eyes -_

_\- in a graveyard, a body falls and Harry wants to cry out his name, “Cedric!” but he’s tied to the tombstone and Wormtail cuts off his own arm and digs a knife deep into Harry’s flesh and Harry screams, louder than he ever has before -_

_\- spells and lights bouncing everywhere and Harry running between rooms, trying not to - and then Sirius is hit, body falling through the arch and Harry c-can’t get through the arch - on the ground, too many souls in his body, and he wants to cry and just die, right here and now -_

_\- bodies rising from the dark water and then fire, endless fire, and Harry and Dumbledore back at the castle and Dumbledore falling from the Astronomy Tower - the words “Half-Blood Prince” ring in his ears and Harry sees werewolves, and -_

_\- under his Invisibility Cloak, the Stone back in the forest, the Wand in Voldemort’s hand, and Harry is - everything has been leading up to this -_

*

He’s skipping his classes again. What’s the use, anyways - he’ll be expelled in nearly a week. He pops the cigarette out of his mouth and smoke slides between his teeth and lips, burning his lungs. He’s outside near a large boulder near the back of the school, where no one goes. 

Another knife he’s stolen is in his hands.

Harry remembers that part of the dream, although it hadn’t necessarily happened to him - “ _blood offering_ ”, and Harry wonders if places like that did exist. He sticks the cigarette back in his mouth, and slashes his arm.

Blood seeps out and Harry presses his wrist to the boulder. Nothing - no quiver or opening or anything remotely magical, and Harry frowns and looks at the glistening red on his arm. Perhaps it hadn’t been enough blood. Perhaps he hadn’t cut deep enough.

He slices at the same spot again, and bites back cries of pain - it shouldn’t hurt now, when he’s thinking of his dream. His dream, of magical caverns and boys in orphanages burning wardrobes down - Harry smiles and imagines an opening forming in the boulder. It has to happen.

It doesn’t. Harry makes two more deep cuts in his wrist - he feels faintly lightheaded, but that’s hardly the issue right now. He blows out another stream of smoke, holding his cigarette with his good hand while his other slathers his blood against the boulder. Something has to happen. Anything.

Nothing. Harry curses, “Fuck!” and his arm is still bleeding, won’t stop bleeding, and Harry’s eyelids are feeling heavy too quickly. He shrugs off two layers of his still too large grey jacket and wraps them around his arm; the rest of his body is already numb, either from the blood loss or the cold.

Harry limps back to his dormitory.

*

He takes his jacket off and admires the scars on his arms. Sort of like - the scar on his forehead, or - no, tattoos, tattoos on arms and skulls and snakes and Harry smiles, sort of without thought. This is nice, he thinks. Lying here, cigarette in bed, no clothes on except pants.

His hand goes to his pants. Nothing really better to do anyways than to wank off, so he does, coming maybe too quickly but it’s not like anyone will ever know. He wipes his hand carelessly on a tissue when he’s done.

Nice, he thinks. This. Emptiness.

He doesn’t need to take pills to drift to sleep. His wounds are still bursting with blood - running down to his wrist, to the edges of his fingertips. Harry doesn’t feel them, though. His eyes are already closed.

(Will he wake up from this dream?)

Not a single breath escapes his lips.

(No.)

**Author's Note:**

> spoiler warnings: overdosing, murder, attempted murder, suicide, attempted suicide, self-harm, major character death


End file.
